Covington Farmers Market (Wed & Sat)

[1THING] Blog

Chasing Ice: A Film Review

By Erica Flock, EarthShare Online Manager

An EIS team member provides scale in a massive landscape of crevasses on a glacier in Iceland / James Balog

This summer, news outlets grimly
reported that the Arctic saw the most extensive ice loss ever. While the
data is harrowing in itself, Director Jeff Orlowski’s new film, Chasing Ice, provides something the
numbers and words of climate change do not: a visceral punch to the gut.

The film presents this reality through the eyes of geologist and
environmental photographer, James Balog. Balog is overcome by the fact that
glaciers are melting faster than he can photograph them. He decides to capture this
geologic vanishing act by setting up time-lapse cameras all over the
Arctic.

Much of the story follows him and his small team of intrepid
engineers and scientists who battle hostile weather and terrain, ailments and
technical glitches to set up the cameras as part of a project called the
Extreme Ice Survey (EIS).

Although the human drama of undertaking the EIS is
interesting, the most intriguing characters of the film are the glaciers
themselves.

Stunning views of turquoise rivers running with ice melt, a
field of sea punctuated with icebergs arching in strange and elegant shapes
into the sky, jaw-dropping nighttime shots of ice boulders illuminated against
a popped starscape and glittery carpets of snow: this is some of the most
incredible “nature” photography you will ever see.

But there is a kind of horror in this landscape too, as
Balog says, for it’s here that the planet is warning us about the sudden impacts
of an atmosphere overloaded with greenhouse gasses.

In one shocking scene, Balog’s video cameras capture an
iceberg the size of Manhattan “calving” (or breaking off from) the main glacier,
twisting violently in the frigid Arctic water as it loosens itself. The
cracking and booming sounds of the fissure are enough to set tiny human hearts
racing: nature’s power is not to be toyed with.

Through the film runs a thread of loss that lends it an
almost funerary air. When I saw it in the theater, no one made a move from
their seats during the closing credits and when the screen finally went to
black, patrons shuffled out without a word.

Chasing Ice
reaches something deeper than the brain. In capturing one of the most desolate
regions of our planet, it manages to ask what it means to be a human today;
what it means to be on the precipice of unprecedented global changes of our own
creation.

[ Leave a Reply ]

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published or shared) (required)

Website

Fill out below CAPTCHA to submit comment:
three − 1 =

By submitting a comment here you grant 1THING New Orleans a perpetual license to reproduce your words and name/web site in attribution. Inappropriate or irrelevant comments will be removed at an admin's discretion.